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I have proposed something of this nature to the Lemmy developers and am waiting on feedback from them.

but it might even be possible to intercept images to check that this exists in the meta data before Lemmy wipes it....

This would be impossible without directly modifying Lemmy itself.

There could be a few trusted folk out there turning their servers into S3 nodes (?) via minio or something like that, which Lemmy's pict-rs could use as storage. The main Lemmy backend process serves out the images anyway (I have no real idea why pict-rs is that separate tbh), so throwing a CDN in front of that (filtered to images and video) should be enough to get some reliability on serving images.

Of course this is only the technical stuff. The legal parts are a completely different issue altogether

There seems to be enough interested people that even if this one were to die, a "phoenix lemmynsfw" or few is almost sure to happen. Of course the issue with that would be getting all the activity back again, so it would be nice if that did not happen.

There is no way in hell a single person will be able to handle an instance of this size (and rapidly growing). Coordinating is a must if this instance (or any other like it should it die before everything gets set up properly) were to stay alive

The JS patch was deployed for a very short time (remember when the NSFW box was showing checked but wasn't? Yeah). Any further development seems to have been done on the Lemmy code itself, under different tags (not branches)

Best of luck, both to you and whatever you decide to do in the future, but also to the poor soul who will now have to maintain all this after you :p

For kickstarting I personally just dumped the relevant ones from my own stash (that were still up, I have a few more I'll need to reupload because Imgur & co) and let the community take over from there, though of the 3 communities I tried it only seems to have worked for 1, so YMMV.

Please keep discussion to the pinned thread. There is a link in the sidebar if pins aren't showing up on your client of choice.

Report them and we'll remove them. This community is starting to get a bit more active than I anticipated so I can't really look at every post by myself like I could at the start.

It's likely a caching issue considering how random it seems to be. Do a CTRL+F5 and try again.

Looking through the (Firefox) devtools, there is only one cookie (being my login token), but a fair bit of cached images (and IndexedDB data for managing said cache), which is what I assume most of that size is.